This article, which was reprinted in Korean for a Korean journal, was still chatted about much when I arrived in country around 1995.  My adult students (20 to 50+ year olds with the majority being non-college people between the ages of 25 to 35) wanted to talk about the Kwangju Massacre to get my thoughts and to explain to me why the US military in Korea and the US relationship with South Korea had big problems.  I knew nothing about modern Korea beyond the war, so I could only listen and ask questions. 
 
And sometimes my students would say that it was "proven" the US knew about the Kwangju Massacre beforehand and approved of it and that this had been recently shown by an American scholar.  It wasn't until about 6 months later that I got internet access and found the Shorrock article and figured out this is the source they were talking about --- which had received coverage by the Korean media.
I firmly believe if readers go into the article with an open mind, and if they pay particular opinion to the quotes from documents Shorrock offers as proof of his claims, you will find, as I did, that his strong language and somewhat vague accusations are not supported by the evidence.
 
What I mean is --- even in my early days in Korea when I was learning about this stuff for the first time --- I found myself writing in the margins of the printed out article the words "stretch" "leap" and "no." 
 
That is my habit when I am running across arguments that seem to bend logic and reasoning too far.  Time and time again in reading the article, I would stop a moment and say what Shorrock was telling me the quote said is not what it said or that he was reaching conclusions you couldn't justify with just the information he was providing.
 
I also thought after having read the article several times that he was actually too vague in what he was accusing the United States of in relation to the Kwangju Massacre --- and this is exactly what you find in Korean society as well.
 
Do you mean the US authorities in Korea knew the Korean special forces unit was going to slaughter people in the city beforehand and approved of it -- thus making the US guilty of a premeditated atrocity?
That is how Shorrock wants you to think through his use of strong language and jumping about throughout the piece, but he does not specifically make the claim outright.
 
Or, do you mean the US has blood on its hands through guilt by association beforehand --- that the US should have left Korea long before Kwangju, because it knew the Korean government was a dictatorship and used violence?

 
 
Or, do you mean the US has blood on its hands through guilt by association after the fact --- that once it learned the extent of what had happened in Korea, it should have pulled out - or overthrown the new regime that had take power through a coup - or it should have placed economic sanctions and other pressure on South Korean society until other generals and political leaders led a counter-coup?
Or, do you mean the US is guilty because it did not step in with its own force in Korea and remove Chun Do-Hwan from power --- that the United States is guilty because it did not remove Chun after it was clear he was taking power or that the US should have supported a counter-coup (which either the US Ambassador or USFK wrote in his book was offered by some unnamed men during this time period) and since Chun was the power in Korea who sent the soldier to Kwangju, the US shares his guilt?
Shorrock does not make a direct case, I believe, for any one of these charges.  Instead, like Koreans, his conclusion is that the US is clearly guilty for Kwangju - and any one of those ways listed above will do for him - and you just pick which you want to believe.
 
In short, the strong statements and method of presentation are meant to create a strong sense of guilty for the Kwangju Massacre without making a real case for it.
 

A. Introduction:

Like similar style news exposes, Shorrock gets a lot of mileage out of the "cloak and dagger" effect.  There is something about the phrase "declassified" and "top secret documents" that lends instant credibility to whatever the author writes.  However, on more than one occasion, when I have gone back to check news archives related to the time period classified documents were written, I was surprised to find the media was already reporting much of the information contained in the classified files.
 
There was confusion about what was going on inside South Korea after the assassination of Park Chung Hee and the Rise of Noh Tae-Woo, but the broad strokes were well reported.  There were also calls of US complicity due to the large role the US government had in South Korea through the alliance.  It sure as hell didn't take Shorrock requesting documents through the Freedom of Information Act for the world to find out Seoul was using elements beyond local police forces to handle the massive demonstrations. Which leads to a very crucial point to keep in mind when reading the rest of this piece --- Besides the chic of "top secret declassified documents," Shorrock relies much on the simple idea that using non-police forces against protesters is by itself an egregious breach of civil society. (The image is from contemporary riot control in Germany) However, even in what we consider solid democratic societies in developed nations, protests that far exceed the ability of the local police manpower to handle, non-police forces are frequently used.  It is not unheard of, nor considered horrific, for the National Guard to be mobilized for crowd control and other purposes such as dealing with large scale riots or disasters or areas were such things could occur -- like sending the National Guard to open up all white schools in the South during the worst days of conflict during the Civil Rights Movement in the US.  That does not excuse any bad, over the top actions such troops might end up engaging in.   A Kent State episode, where Vietnam War protesters were shot by, I believe, ROTC cadets organized to regulate the campus protests, is not defensible.  The police don't have a green light to use any means of force it wants --- especially lethal force.  Nor do any non-police forces tapped to augment the local police.  --------- But, using military type units to deal with the kinds of massive, widespread protests that South Korea faced after the assassination of Park Chung Hee is not so abnormal by international standards.   As you read the article, even the "natural" outrage at the use of Special Forces troops can be called into question when you hear that the troops were known to have been given some form of training in riot control --- which doesn't give you the idea they were taught how to bayonet civilians but were taught policing techniques. Later in the article as well, you will see that demonstrations after the assassination of Park Chung Hee and trouble in transition to a new administration were widespread throughout Korea with many of the protests being violent.  If you look around protests today ---- 2005 ----- it isn't uncommon to witness violence.  Images of the violent protests of the late 1980s in Korea around the time of the Olympics are also clearly remembered around the world.   Again, knowing the history of violent protests in Korean society ------- does absolutely nothing to justify what happened in Kwangju.   But, the US authorities at the time have argued since being accused of green lighting the Kwangju Massacre - based in part on the "outrage" that non-police forces were used - that before the reality of what had happened in Kwangju became known, nobody expected Korean forces would do what they did there.  --- Meaning, the kind of riots and suppression of protests that were going on all over Korea at the time of national turmoil were not highly unusual or unheard of in Korean society.  Nobody expected the kind of actions and bloodshed that occurred in Kwangju -- even though non-police forces were being put into use.  So, an argument based on "You should have known and thus stopped it" doesn't work here.

This is an interesting nugget in the report.  Nowhere in it does Shorrock tell us what he believes should have happened before, during, or after the Kwangju Massacre.

(A Korean school girl in 2005 writes down class notes at a gravesite for victims of the Kwangju Massacre.  In July 2005, South Korea's Unification Minister, who is also the point man on national security for the President Roh administration, said :

the Kwangju Democratic Uprising of 1980 was thwarted by an “invisible hand.” The minister was telling an Uri Party policy committee how the destiny of the Korean Peninsula has been controlled by outside forces for the last 100 years.
“A hundred years ago, the Philippines became a U.S. colony and the Korean Peninsula a Japanese one owing to the Taft-Katsura Agreement” of 1905, Chung said. “The division of the nation and Korean War were not our will either,” nor was the failure of the Kwangju Uprising. A century later, Chung promised “a hot summer in which our fate will be decided not by North Korea, China, the United States, Japan or Russia, but by our own pride and self-determination.”

(As anyone who stays in Korea for a year or more and talks to Koreans will learn, Korea can find a way to blame everything on the United States - including the colonization by Japan beginning in the late 1800s.  To accomplish this, they project America's strength in the world post-WWII, after the European powers had destroyed themselves in global industrial warfare and American society had erupted out of its isolationist mode, back into the turn of the 19th-20th Century -- to a period in which Japan had just finished destroying what was considered a major Euro-Asian Empire --- Russia --- while the United States was considered an ex-colony upstart.    President Roosevelt was picked to facilitate a peace treaty between Russia and Japan in 1905 -- in very large measure -- because America was seen as a more neutral arbiter than European powers who had vast Asian colonial holdings and had been showing great interest in acquiring more - particularly in China.  Japan shocked the world with its stunning victory over Russia fought at sea and in Korea and Manchuria.  Some decades earlier, Japan had fought a war in Korea with China over primary influence there.  In 1905, when the meeting between Taft and Katsura was held, Japan was solidly established in Korea and in control of Korea and had just wipe the floor with the biggest threat to its hold in Korea ---- but, it is the United States who caused/allowed the colonization to take place..........It is a load of shit designed to boost Korean pride and sooth its sorrow which they convince some outsiders to believe in too....)

All the powerful language aside (like "complicity"), the best case he makes against the US is one of "guilt by association."  Later on, a former official under the Carter administration will hit this point more directly, but it is the gist of what Shorrock is claiming without directly stating it.   And this leads to a question I've put to many Koreans who wanted to talk about the Kwangju Massacre --- if you were the president of the United States, what would you have had the US in Korea do?  Should the US have overthrown the part of the Korean government and military that was taking power after Park Chung Hee was killed?  Should US troops have fought with Korean troops to do so?   Or, should the US have pulled out of Korea altogether because Chun was taking power?  Should the US have pulled out of Korea altogether when Park Chung Hee instituted the constitutional changes in the early 1970s that gave him such strong, dictatorial powers?   In either the book by the former US Ambassador to Korea at the time of the massacre or the USFK commander's book on the period, the author points out Chun's rise to power was not a totally bloodless coup.  Some people died when Chun forces seized other leaders who could oppose him.  So, the author asks, why should we believe Chun and supporters would back down at pressure asserted by the United States when they were willing to fight and die against their own fellow countrymen when they were taking power away from top government officials?   And of course, none of the Koreans I talked to said the US should have used military force to prevent Chun from taking power as he was leading up to and after the Kwangju Massacre.   And in the quote above, we see Shorrock already complaining about the "extent of US intervention in the political process" in Korea.  So, what the fuck does he want?   What he wants is to find means to criticize US foreign policy.  He doesn't come right out and say the US should have never been in Korea to begin with -- so it is guilty of the Kwangju Massacre by being there in the first place.  He doesn't directly state the US has blood on its hands by being an accessory after the fact --- that the US not pulling out of Korea after the massacre is a sign of approval of it.  And he doesn't say the US should have used force to oppose Korean troops sent to Kwangju or anywhere else.   I guess Shorrock is a Derridian reporter --- it isn't his job to construct things but only deconstruct. But, as you read the article (or you listen to Korean adults talk about the massacre), you can see they silently imply there must have been an obvious way the US could have either prevented the Kwangju Massacre or gotten rid of the Korean leaders who ordered it after the fact..

Keep this line in mind as you read.  The discussion of the Shorrock article has tended to focus on what the US knew about where the Special Forces troops were going and whether they were under the USFK chain of command or just the Korean military.

B. The Cherokee Files

This is classic bait and switch material.  As noted above, the reader is supposed to have an immediate negative reaction to the idea non-police forces would be used to deal with demonstrations, but some types of military units (like the National Guard in the US) are regularly used in developed, democratic nations.
 
Then, rather than addressing this point --- going further into the idea of using such troops --- he jumps immediately, and I mean immediately, to the coup.  It reads as if he is directly stating the US military gave approval for Chun to seize power, right?   Well, no, he doesn't state that directly.  He simply plans for you to connect those dots yourself.  Why else melt these two things together in the sentence above?   And again in the second sentence, he baits and switches ---  He does not directly say the US in Korea approved of the massacre, but that is what he wants to imply by taking a huge leap. His logic is ---- the US knew the SWC troops were being sent to handle protests.  Those units killed a lot of people.  Thus, the US knew they were going to kill a lot of people.
 

Later on, I will cut and paste the section in red where it comes into play again.  It is part of another rhetorical strategy Shorrock uses to great effect throughout the article. In the early sections of it, and at the lead of many of the sections and paragraphs, when I first read this piece, I kept finding myself write "no it doesn't" and "leap" when the early strong words and claims by Shorrock did not match what he quoted from the secret cables. I believe you will come to see this as we go on.

Cloak and Dagger...

Gee Golly Wilikers!!  How "devastating" can the portrait of US responsibility for the Kwangju Massacre be when even Shorrock shows us in quotes that the US was suggesting the Korean government us "care and restraint"? This sure as hell isn't the kind of smoking gun language I'd expect to here (though Bruce Cummings would disagree). This is what I mean by the leaps in logic and disconnect between implied or stated claim vs. quotes he provides from the documents.

Remember ---"U.S. officials also knew the contingency plans included the deployment of Special Warfare Command troops to Seoul and Kwangju."                                                         and

"The documents contradict key statements....did not know in advance that Special Forces were being sent to Kwangju.

How devastating an indictment can "probably" be?

I split this paragraph in two, because like with too many of the paragraphs in this essay, Shorrock jumps around --- for effect. He lays out the standard journalistic technique of the "some experts say" to imply the US in Korea was approving chemical warfare against civilians.  Then he jumps to a US decision after the massacre. This is key and tricky to note.    So far, we haven't really gotten into much of the massacre itself.  We have been building to it.  He has been laying out the foundation of what had been taking place before it happened. Then all of a sudden, we are jumping to "Carter administration decided to support Mr. Chun's suppression of the Kwangju Uprising on May 22." What happened to May 18th and 19th?  --- the two days the vast majority of the killings took place?  Why jump from the US silently or overtly approving of the use of chemical warfare against civilians to a decision made on the 22nd - when the biggest days of bloodshed were the 18th and 19th??? Bait and switch --

(Wikipedia -- CS gas (commonly called "tear gas"), or ortho-chloro-benzal malonitrile, is a usually non-lethal riot control agent. Tear gas is a chemical compound (often generated by a burning process) which, in humans, causes immediate tearing of the eyes, mild respiratory convultion, an increase in blood pressure and pulse, as well as the irritation of mucous membranes. Tear gas is available in a number of different chemical formulations with effects ranging from mild tearing of the eyes to immediate vomiting and prostration.

  CS is often delivered in a fine powder via aerosol grenades. It is often used in conjunction with OC spray, which is commonly called pepper spray. CS gas and OC sprays are usually used by police to disperse riots and demonstrations. The use of CS gas by the FBI during the siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, has been the subject of controversy.
 
As with all riot control agents, their use for chemical warfare is prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention.
 
Members of the armed forces of the United States of America and other countries are often exposed to CS during initial training to show the importance of proper wearing of a gas mask. As the agent's presence quickly reveals improper fit or seal of the mask's rubber gaskets against the face, it is sometimes used during training refresher courses or equipment maintenance exercises as well. CS gas was heavily used in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland during the "Battle of the Bogside", a two-day riot in August, 1969. A total of 1,091 canisters of gas, containing 12.5g of CS; and 14 canisters of gas, containing 50g of CS, were released in the densely populated residential area¹. On 30 August the Himsworth Enquiry was set up to investigate the medical effects of its use in Derry. Its conclusions, viewed in the political context of the time, still pointed towards the necessity of further testing of CS gas before being used as a riot control agent. Not long after, the British Army and RUC ceased using CS gas in Derry. It is well accepted that CS gas accentuates illness when inflicted on sufferers of bronchitis, asthma, liver or kidney diseases and epilepsy.)

Later, we shall see the US response to the question of its recommendations and the events of May 22. After a couple of days of massacre, the city was still in a state of general unrest and turmoil, and the US agreed that it was a good idea to send in regular military troops to replace the paratroopers who had been the spearhead of the massacre.   That is supposed to be the big bombshell Shorrock plops down in the above sentence. But isn't it slick?  We haven't even gotten to the massacre days yet, and he leaps ahead to a decision of a later day ---- AND --- he doesn't (yet) give the description of the environment that decision was made in. In effect, he is trying to use what some might consider a reasonable decision AFTER the Kwangju Massacre became known ---- to support his main (implied) claim that the US gave approval for the massacre itself.   That is what this selective slip-n-slide of information coupled with strong words seeks to accomplish. I'd also like to add --- Pepper spray could be considered a "chemical warfare" tool --- if used in war.  I have no idea what nations have banned or continue to use CS gas.  I especially don't know how many nations considered it too strong and harmful back in 1979-1980.  Those figures would give me a better idea of what "some experts" have to say about it.   And I'd like to point this out ----   We have just been told, here, that the special warfare troops were actually given some form of riot control training.  ???  So, how does that mesh with the start of the essay where Shorrock wants us to take it for granted the very idea such units would be used for anything but fighting behind enemy lines is outrageous?

Again, if it were not for the bold statements of conclusion and the strong language Shorrock throws in, if you just read the quotes from the Top Secret documents, you would think they were actually arguing against a claim the US in Korea approved of the Kwangju Massacre.  This is the smoking gun of guilt?

One of the books by either the US ambassador or USFK commander points out that a book written by a Peace Corps member in Kwangju at the time believes the something like 22 civilians who were killed when the regular army units moved into Kwangju to restore order after the main days of the massacre at the hands of the paratroopers had passed were 22 civilians too many.  That is an opinion that has some merit, but May 22nd was not May 19th or 18th.  The deaths on the 22nd were not in the scope and numbers as under the onslaught of the special forces.

C: State Department Reaction

As stated earlier, the use of the National Guard or similar units is not unheard of in many developed democracies when the size of the unrest is beyond the control of local police forces.

But, as the official points out, the norm they had gotten used to was NOT massacres -- was not soldiers bayonnetting citizens in the street --- and for that matter --- the norm in Korean protests, though violent on both side - was not protesters riding around the streets in confiscated military jeeps carrying M-16s.....

This article is supposed to be a smoking gun proving the US complicity in the Kwangju Massacre?

Again, does this information way down here match up well with the strong claims of the opening paragraphs???  This is the proof of guilt???

Why does this not surprise me?  Bruce Cumings, the man who has made a career out of trying to make the Korean War the first Vietnam has no problem stretching these quotes into a "smoking gun" of US guilt in Kwangju. I bring back up an earlier point --- what are Cumings and Shorrock and the like trying to imply the US should have done?  Words clearly weren't enough.  So what?  Trade sanctions?  Pulling USFK out?  Using Korean and US troops to overthrow the Korean government under Chun?  US soldiers trading shots with Chun's guards? The USFK commander or the ambassador at the time of these events wrote in his book that a high level Korean officer approached him about a counter-coup.  The general said a group of military men and civil leaders were laying plans to take the government back away from Chun and his supporters, and the group wanted to know if the US would support them. The US authorities in Korea discouraged the act, and it didn't happen. Am I supposed to believe the US could have taken the blood of Kwangju off its hands, in Mr. Cumings' opinion, if it had supported a counter coup?  No fucking way... But again, the argument here is weakly applied guilt for "green lighting" the Kwangju Massacre ---- but with a fall back, more directly stated guilt by association after the fact if the reader won't buy that the US authorities knew and approved of the massive killings beforehand.

Good old Bruce.  The man who decided in his history of the Korean War he couldn't come to a conclusion on who started it.

Guilt by association --- the 'we shouldn't have been in Korea supporting the Korean government to start with' argument.  it is a perfectly acceptable position to take.  But, it does not prove the US is responsible at all for the Kwangju Massacre.  It sure as hell isn't a "green light" that the US knew the massacre was going to take place and OK'd it beforehand.

D. Background

(The image is from 2005 - a typical demonstration in South Korea's affluent, democratic society --- the use of large bamboo clubs and steel pipes being a not too infrequent protest tool...)

I break in here for a moment of confusion.  Has he not already shown a case for the US in Korea's long term policy goals being to influence the government toward democratic reform????

That is the quote that proves the US was telling the opposition groups they could "not expect long-term support for their struggles"?